Highlights from JAPANTEX 2018

JAPANTEX 2018 was held over three days, November 20 – 22, at the Tokyo Big Sight International Exhibition Center. The event, which is currently in its 37^th year, serves as an annual exhibition of interior fabrics. Around 8,700 visitors, as well as exhibitors from 277 companies, attended the event, which this year focused on a combination theme of Japanese style and interior beauty, mixed with all the professionalism one can expect at this type of event.

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EFI Reggiani Pushes Single Pass Boundaries with New BOLT Hybrid Printer

Last week represented a significant milestone in EFI Reggiani’s history of providing printing solutions for the textile industry. The company announced its EFI Reggiani BOLT, a digital single pass production textile printer. To celebrate this event and highlight BOLT’s capabilities, the company invited almost 300 people to witness the unveiling – including customers, media, and its channel representatives from around the world – in its factory in Bergamo, Italy.

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Kofax to Acquire Nuance’s Document Imaging Business

On November 12, Kofax announced its intention to acquire the Nuance Document Imaging (NDI) division of Nuance Communications. If the deal closes as expected in Q1 of 2019, the move will catapult Kofax—already the 800-pound gorilla in the document capture market—to the leadership position in print-management and cost-recovery solutions, too. NDI itself is a product of Nuance’s once-acquisitive nature.

Source: http://www.picpedia.org/highway-signs/a/acquisition.html

The division’s portfolio of document solutions includes a host of product families purchased over the past decade or so, such as Equitrac (purchased in 2011), Output Manager (which came with the NSi acquisition in 2014), and Safecom (bought in 2012) for print management; Equitrac Professional and Copitrak (added in 2012) for cost recovery; AutoStore (another NSi product) and eCopy (acquired in 2009) for document capture and workflow; Business Connect for mobile document imaging; and OmniPage, PaperPort, and Power PDF for PDF and document conversion (these products, or the seeds for them, came from the original merger between Nuance and ScanSoft in 2005). Read more »

MTEX Solutions: A Key Iberian Manufacturer, Sprouting New Industrial Printers

MTEX Solutions, the Portuguese manufacturer of digital printers for textile and label applications, recently held its debut summit for customers and prospects in Porto, Portugal’s beautiful port city. Sporting the tagline “Back, Better than Ever,” the summit drew participants from as far away as Russia and the U.S. These attendees came to learn about a key industrial inkjet printer vendor, one lately transformed and growing internationally, and its new products. Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends (InfoTrends) attended the event and offers here what it captured about the company and its newest hardware.

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Nintendo Labo Shows Potential for New Sustainable Corrugated Cardboard Applications

Consumer electronics specialist Nintendo has been enjoying positive growth. Its newest video game console, the Nintendo Switch, is proving quite popular among consumers who are seeking an innovative gaming experience at home and on the go. With its numbers back in the green, the Japanese video game manufacturer has returned to doing what it does best—taking creative risks. One of its most recent products, Nintendo Labo, exemplifies the company’s desire to push the envelope.

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Why North America is Embracing Digital Wide Format Printing

The digital revolution is impacting every industry, and this includes wide format printing. Advancements in digital wide format technology have created the potential for new offerings. This is important news for a wide variety of businesses, including marketing firms as well as sign, graphics, and visual communication companies. In our recent analysis, Embracing Digital Wide Format Printing, Keypoint Intelligence – InfoTrends explores how signage companies can leverage these innovations and highlights the benefits of making the switch.

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Digital Print, Expanding Horizons in Woodworking

The biannual International Woodworking Fair, which took place August 21-25 in Atlanta, GA, held its inaugural Digital Printing Symposium, which was created in partnership between IWF, the organizers of the show, Surface & Panel Magazine, and Keypoint intelligence. While this symposium is new, digital printing has actually been part of the woodworking industry for some time. That said, the need to short-run cost-effective decorative surfaces, as well as ongoing development in digital inkjet printing sector, is creating a perfect storm for the technology to meet woodworking’s market needs.

Inaugural IWF Digital Print Symposium

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The Ricoh Ecosystem: Interact 2018

Do you go to vendor open houses and networking events? If you are a customer of any of the big hardware vendors or many of the independent software vendors you are likely to receive a cheery invitation to one or more events each year that give you an opportunity to hear from the company executives and listen to technical presentations on current and future products. They usually bring in a few industry speakers and try to create an environment where everyone has an opportunity to network. These are valuable experiences for the vendors who host them, the customers who attend them, and the journalists and analysts to attend, as well.

Ricoh recently hosted their Interact 2018 meeting in Westminster, Colorado, just a short ride form their plant in Boulder. The event was full of interesting insights from Ricoh staff, customers, and industry speakers, but that wasn’t the most interesting thing about Interact. For a company like Ricoh there are a lot of moving parts. Even inside of Commercial and Industrial Printing, led in the US by John Fulena, there are production cut sheet, production web, wide format, and a variety of industrial print devices worthy of your attention. Staging a conference where attendees can get a sense of Ricoh – One Ricoh – is difficult. How many sessions do you run concurrently? how do you give everyone podium time to talk about their innovations?

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Smart Package Manufacturing: HP One Package Workflow Suite Brings New Levels of Optimization

Corrugated product producers have traditionally thought in terms of square meters and board feet. The goal: keep corrugated products heading out the door. For corrugators that meant keeping the corrugator online and in production which was managed with a Manufacturing Execution System tied to standard business management software suites. Corrugated board manufacturers often use their business systems to manage their manufacturing requirements, augmented with process-specific tools. The advent of digital corrugated production options adds many more requirements to the production workflow, most of which are closer to traditional commercial printing than traditional converting. With experience born from implementations of both digital liner preprinting ahead of corrugation and digital corrugated board printing (“post printing”) comes the HP One Package workflow suite targeted toward users of all HP PageWide Industrial corrugated presses.

Source: HP

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Keypoint Intelligence Forecasts Continued Growth in Business Inkjet & A4 Color Laser Shipments through 2022 in North America and Western Europe

While the overall office equipment markets in NA and WE are mature, Keypoint Intelligence/InfoTrends expect continued growth in A4 Color Laser and Business Inkjet Segment 3 & 4 according to recently published SF Printer and MFP Hardware Forecasts for both regions. In addition, the shift from SF printers to multi-functional devices will continue. According to the forecast, in North America, SF Laser printers represented 46% of total shipments in 2017 and are expected to decline to 42% of devices compared with MF shipments which will grow from 52% to 58% by 2022.  While in Western Europe MF shipments will grow from 55% to 59% of total shipments during the same period.

In addition, total NA office color laser shipments are also expected to outperform monochrome devices during the same period growing from 33% of total shipments to 37% by 2022. While in Western Europe, office color laser is expected to grow from 39% of total shipments to 41% during the same period. While the overall market for both regions will remain relatively flat to a slight decline the shift from SF to MF devices and from monochrome to color will continue to impact the overall office equipment market. The biggest opportunity for growth is within the office color laser A4 segments (2-4) for both regions. The chart below provides a breakout by region and segment.

North America & Western Europe Office A4 Color Laser Forecast 2017-2022

Business Inkjet Segments Continue to Grow

In addition to the growth in A4 color laser, Keypoint Intelligence/InfoTrends forecast shows growth in Business Inkjet Segments 3 and 4 through the same period. Business Inkjet Segment 3 is expected to grow at 5.9% CAGR in North America and 2.8% CAGR in Western Europe.  The majority of unit growth will be in A4 MFPs in this business inkjet segment with new models that offer longer life consumables and feature-rich product offerings. This new breed of inkjet devices offers an attractive alternative to laser particularly within the SMB office environment with standard wireless connectivity, high yield consumables and in some cases, comparable cost per page to laser. Furthermore, Inkjet Segment 4 is expected to grow at 10.8% CAGR in North America and 3.7% CAGR by 2022 in Western Europe during the same period, driven by a wider acceptance of page-wide technology and new robust high-speed color inkjet devices entering this market segment.

North America and Western Europe Business Inkjet Segment 3 and 4 Shipment Forecast 2017-2022

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